Credit Union Websites Top ACSI Rankings

The American Consumer Satisfaction Index has added a new category and credit unions came out on top.

The ACSI’s new Website Satisfaction Index measured consumer satisfaction across 33 different industries and said credit unions earned the top score of 86, followed by consumer shipping and banks at 85.

“In contrast, social media, which include companies with an enormous user base, perform less well with an ACSI score of 68,” ACSI said in its announcement Tuesday. The aggregate score for website satisfaction was 78.2 out of 100, the organization said.

The ACSI has been measuring overall satisfaction with credit unions since 2008 and the financial industry for the past 20 years, it said.

ACSI said the website scores are based on more than 25,000 interviews on user experience with more than 200 companies within the 33 industry categories covered by ACSI throughout the year.

Satisfaction with websites and satisfaction with the overall purchase process can vary, ACSI noted. It said the widest variation was for airlines, where 80 was the score for website satisfaction and 69 was the score for overall customer satisfaction, close to the bottom.

Other high scores included consumer shipping and hotels at 85 and 84, respectively, while joining social media at the bottom were Internet service providers at 70 and subscription television service at 70 and 72, respectively.

“The huge amount of traffic on social media websites creates a user base where preferences, abilities and interests vary greatly, unlike the user base of a credit union, for example,” said Claes Fornell, founder and chairman of ACSI in Ann Arbor, Mich. “The large number of users also has led to a degree of monopoly power such that the threat of user defection due to dissatisfaction is, at least for now, not very potent.”